1541–2 in R. Pitcairn Criminal Trials Scotl. 257* Remission to John Lausone..for his capture and apprehension.

1611 R. Cotgrave Dict. French & Eng. Tongues Capture, a capture or taking.

1713 J. Addison in Guardian 12 Sept. 1/2 Being concerned in several Captures, he brought home with him an Estate of about twelve thousand Pounds.

1841 M. Elphinstone Hist. India II. viii. i. 197 After Akber's capture of Ahmednagar.

1848 J. Arnould Law Marine Insurance II. iii. ii. 813 Capture is..the forcible taking of a ship, etc. in time of war, with a view to appropriating it as prize.

1873 J. Morley Rousseau II. 124 The primitive usages of..marriages by capture, purchase, and the rest.

1898 Geogr. Jrnl. 11 441 M. Meunier explains the distribution of erratics in the neighbourhood of the Alps by the ‘capture’ of one glacier by another, the head of which has eaten back through the dividing wall, and thus tapped the ice-supply.

1908 J. Lomas in Nature Book I. 165 Standing at the elbow of the capture of the Hodder, and looking seawards.

1965 A. Holmes Princ. Physical Geol. (rev. ed.) xix. 560 Eventually C₂ is intercepted, its headwaters are diverted into S₁ and its lower course is beheaded. This process is called river capture. The rectangular bend e at the point of diversion is known as the elbow of capture.

1910 T. J. J. See Res. Evol. Stellar Syst. II. xxiv. 731 The Capture Theory is so overwhelmingly indicated by the most diverse phenomena of the Starry Heavens, that I cannot doubt that it represents an ultimate truth... Moons and planets..always drift towards the powerful centres of attraction, and are finally captured or absorbed.

1940 Monthly Notices Royal Astron. Soc. C. 552 The decisive moment for capture is when the parent stars have only just separated after the collision.

1958 Listener 20 Nov. 821/2 A few years ago Hoyle also believed in the capture theory but in a different form.

1923 Rutherford in Proc. Cambr. Philos. Soc. 21 510 The capture of electrons by flying α particles has thus opened up a new and interesting field of enquiry.

1929 J. Chadwick in Proc. Royal Soc. A. 123 383 The disintegration [of the nucleus] is supposed to occur when an α-particle penetrates into a nucleus and is captured by it, the result of the capture being the emission of a proton.

1938 R. W. Lawson tr. G. von Hevesy & F. A. Paneth Man. Radioactivity (ed. 2) ii. 33 In the course of the flight of an α-particle this capture and loss of electrons is repeated several thousand times.

1955 F. L. Friedman & V. F. Weisskopf in W. Pauli Niels Bohr & Devel. Physics 136 The actual predominance of capture over scattering in low energy resonances is easily described.

1971 F. J. M. Laver in B. de Ferranti Living with Computer v. 44 The capture of data at its point of origin, its rapid transmission over telecommunication links, and its filtering and analysis by computers.

1984 Glaxo Group News Apr. 8/5 The systems installed are used for a wide variety of applications such as the capture of cancer research data.

1986 Pract. Computing Oct. 32/1 The simplest form of file transfer is using the capture or log to disc facility of your software.

1900 Geogr. Jrnl. 16 36 It may then have happened that whole basins, like that of Lake Mascardi, drained formerly towards Nahuelhuapi, have been captured towards the Pacific slopes.

1908 J. Lomas in Nature Book I. 166 Along the Vale of York, where the rocks are softer than those of the Pennines or East Yorkshire, the Don sent up a tributary and successively captured the rivers to form what is now the Ouse.

1965 A. Holmes Princ. Physical Geol. (rev. ed.) xix. 562 The headwaters of the Aire..were captured by the Ribble.

1910 T. J. J. See Res. Evol. Stellar Syst. II. xxiv. 731 The Capture Theory is so overwhelmingly indicated by the most diverse phenomena of the Starry Heavens, that I cannot doubt that it represents an ultimate truth... Moons and planets..always drift towards the powerful centres of attraction, and are finally captured or absorbed.

1958 tr. J. Verne's Round Moon 11 It had however travelled so near to the moon that it had been ‘captured’ by the lunar gravitation.

1959 Listener 23 Apr. 708/1 Mercury has a captured rotation; that is to say, its sidereal period is equal to its axial rotation period, eighty-eight Earth days in each case.

1961 Listener 9 Nov. 766/1 According to one theory, minor satellites of this sort are really in the nature of captured asteroids.

1969 Times 13 June 7/7 It seems that the moon was either a wandering planet that was captured by the earth or else was formed from a cloud of matter.

1923 Rutherford in Proc. Cambr. Philos. Soc. 21 506 The α particle in passing through matter occasionally captures an electron.

1929 J. Chadwick in Proc. Royal Soc. A. 123 383 The disintegration [of the nucleus] is supposed to occur when an α-particle penetrates into a nucleus and is captured by it, the result of the capture being the emission of a proton.

1956 A. H. Compton Atomic Quest 18 The uranium atom when it captured the neutron, became unstable and divided into roughly two equal parts.

1971 Computers & Humanities 6 46 A terminal that cannot capture text without the help of the main computer cannot therefore be considered.

1977 Building Societies Gaz. July 697/2 Datapad requires no specialist training, captures data at source, eliminates punching and verifying errors, accepts most freehand writing styles and produces clean input data for any mainframe system.

1980 Regional Lang. Stud.—Newfoundland ix. 22 Twenty or thirty pages are being captured experimentally, with appropriate codes, on a diskette for printing out.

1980 National Westm. Bank Q. Rev. Feb. 20/1 Equipment of this type..will enable customer accounting data to be captured for subsequent posting to accounts at the same time as the transaction at the counter is being completed.

1985 DSNA Newslet. Fall 7/1 No further data will be supported at Waterloo until the entire text of the Dictionary has been captured and proofed.